Quotes about excursion

A collection of quotes on the topic of excursion, making, other, going.

Quotes about excursion

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Secret, Dreams, Feeling, Cats

“Modern scientists attempt excursions to other planets, but they have no information of how many different types of oceans and seas there are within the universe. According to their experience, the Moon is full of dust, but this does not explain how it gives us soothing rays from a distance of millions of miles. As far as we are concerned, we follow the authority of Vyasadeva and Sukadeva Gosvami, who have described the universal situation according to the Vedic literature. These authorities differ from modern scientists who conclude from their imperfect sensual experience that only this planet is inhabited by living beings whereas the other planets are all vacant or full of dust.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 4, verse 15, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/4/15 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Literature, Universe, Sea

“The word garuda in this verse indicates that there are planets of great birds like Garuda. Similarly, the word uraga indicates that there are planets of enormous serpents. Such a description of the various planets of the universe may challenge modern scientists who think that all planets but this earth are vacant. These scientists claim to have launched excursions to the Moon, where they have found no living entities but only big craters full of dust and stone, although in fact the Moon is so brilliant that it acts like the sun in illuminating the entire universe. Of course, it is not possible to convince modern scientists of the Vedic information about the universe. Nonetheless, we are not very much impressed by the words of scientists who say that all other planets are vacant and that only the earth is full of living entities.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 4, verse 5-7, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/4/5-7 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Bird, Thinking, Universe, Sun

“How the Ganges water reaches the various planets from the top of the universe is explained herein. Celestial airplanes carry the water from the planets of the sages to other planets. So-called advanced scientists of the modern age are trying to go to the higher planets, but at the same time they are experiencing a power shortage on earth. If they were actually capable scientists, they could personally go by airplane to other planets, but this they are unable to do. Having now given up their Moon excursions, they are attempting to go to other planets, but without success.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 5, Chapter 17, verse 4, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/5/17/4 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Age, Universe, Water, Time

“Learning … should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

The Sound of Thunder (1957) Pt. I, Ch. 9
1950s
Context: Learning … should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail. So its surroundings should be as gracious as possible, to complement it.

Life, Men, Learning, Joy

“When we have a willingness to ask that first question, Who Am I?, and then to create the answer, it is immensely powerful to not simply respond to the question intellectually, as an intellectual excursion, but to create a response that makes sense to our Soul. A response that announces Who We Choose To Be, as opposed to who we imagine ourselves to be. Who I choose to be is an Individuation of Divinity, a wave on the Ocean of God.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Soul, Imagination, God, Question

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Sad, Wise, Deep, Depressing

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

World, Heart

“I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: Predilections by Mark Singer http://www.errolmorris.com/content/profile/singer_predilections.html

People, Truth, Idea, Knowledge

“Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts. The immigrant neighborhood is often made up of people who have come from one province in the old country. Inevitably the culture of that neighborhood will be that of the old country; its language will persist and its traditions will flourish. It is not that we undervalue these, or desire to discredit them. But separated from the land and surroundings that gave them birth, from the history that cherishes them, they do not remain the strong, beautiful things they were on the other side. These aliens may retain some of the form of culture of the land of their birth long after its spirit has departed or has lost its savor in a new atmosphere. New opportunities, strange conditions, unforeseen adjustments, necessary sacrifices, and forces unseen and not understood affect the immigrant and his life here, and unless this culture is connected and fused with that of the new world, it loses its vitality or becomes corrupt.

Men, World, Law, Home

“During my cadet years, West Point was still a military cloister, linked tenuously to the outside world by the West Shore Railway, the excursion boats on the Hudson, and a winding road leading westward into New Jersey. A cadet normally entered the Academy in July and never left it on vacation until his second Christmas. In the meantime, he led a completely regimented life, arising at six, going to bed at ten and rarely having a moment without a duty to occupy it.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 25

Life, World, Christmas

“Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 15: In the Sierra Foot-Hills

Beauty, Way, Mountain, Learning

“The natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me… in particularities of physical causes more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both those persons. Not because those final causes are not true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province; but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book VII, 7
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Nature, Solitude, Study, Parting

“A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.”

Mary Antin book The Promised Land

Source: The Promised Land (1912), Ch. 10.

“I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"It Has to Cost Them Something," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle505-20090208-02.html 8 February 2009.

Water, Housing

“The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction"

“The Maunder minimum corresponds almost precisely with the coldest excursion of the 'little ice age', a period of unusual cold in Europe from the 16th century through the early 19th century. In the coldest extremes of that period the average temperature was about one degree Celsius colder than it is now, according to the British climatologist Hubert H. Lamb. In that period the Alpine glaciers advanced farther than they had since the last major glaciation 15,000 years ago. In that period too the Norse colony in southwestern Greenland perished to a man, cut off from the rest of the world by pack ice that year after year failed to thaw.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Age, World

“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wilderness", p. 200.

History, Search, Success

“Despite the 43 years I've devoted to cinematography, I must admit that I was scarcely prepared for the many problems which were to confront me upon my initial excursion into the realm of television with the "I Love Lucy" show. Fortunately, this motion picture experience helped to cushion many of the serious problems and aided me in adapting myself to this new medium.”

Karl Freund (1890–1969) German film director and cinematographer

Filming The Lucy Show (December 1953)

Love, Problem, Help

“Sooltan Mahmood, in the year AH 863 (AD 1485), again marched against the Rajpoots. On arriving at the town of Dhar, he detached Gheias-ood-Deen to lay waste the country of the Kolies and Bheels. In this excursion the Prince penetrated to the hills of Koombulmere, and on his return, having given the King some description of that fortress, Sooltan Mahmood resolved to march thither. On the next day he moved for that purpose, destroying all the temples on the road…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1435-1469) On Way to Kumbhalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Country

“His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Something Fresh

Something Fresh (1915)

Life, God, Pain, Happiness

“The term "cult" is always one of individual judgment. It has been variously applied to groups involved in beliefs and practices just off the beat of traditional religions; to groups making exploratory excursions into non-Western philosophical practices; and to groups involving intense relationships between followers and a powerful idea or leader. The people I have studied, however, come from groups in the last, narrow band of the spectrum: groups such as the Children of God, the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Krishna Consciousness movement, the Divine Light Mission, and the Church of Scientology. I have not had occasion to meet with members of the People's Temple founded by the late Reverend Jim Jones, who practiced what he preached about being prepared to commit murder and suicide, if necessary, in defense of the faith.”

Margaret Singer (1921–2003) clinical psychology

Coming Out of the Cults http://www.cultfaq.org/coming-out-of-the-cults.html, Dr. Margaret Singer, Psychology Today, January, 1979 1970s

God, Children, People, Faith

“Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 287
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Light

“There are many interesting phenomena … which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 35, "Color Vision"; 35-1 "The human eye"; p. 35-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Nature, Sense

“Two recent studies of the geomagnetic field in the last 1Myr have found 14 excursions, large changes in direction lasting 5–10kyr each, six of which are established as global phenomena by correlation between different sites. The older picture of the geomagnetic field enjoying long periods of stable polarity may not therefore be correct; instead, the field appears to suffer many dramatic changes in direction and concomitant reduction in intensity for 10–20 per cent of the time. During excursions the field may reverse in the liquid outer core, which has timescales of 500yr or less, but not in the solid inner core, where the field must change by diffusion with a timescale of 3kyr. This timescale is consistent with the remarkably uniform duration of well-dated excursions. The disparity of dynamical timescales between the inner and outer cores, a factor of 10, is consistent with the 10 excursions between full reversals.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

[The distinction between geomagnetic excursions and reversals, Geophysical Journal International, 137, 1, 1 April 1999, F1–F3, 10.1046/j.1365-246x.1999.00810.x]

Study, Suffering, Appearance, Change

“Instead of working to change a people, we have a static and racist view of a people and their culture. It is the Bible and the mission which must change, not the people! We must teach a “black English” if any at all, and a black, brown, or yellow Christianity, if any at all. It takes only a brief excursion into “liberation theology,” contextualization, and like doctrines to realize that it is not Christianity at all which is taught, but a counterfeit. Relevance is sought, not to the Lord and His word, but to fallen man and his racial heritage. Such is not the Gospel; it is the new racism.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

People, Change

“Our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

"Postscript to the News", broadcast on BBC radio, June 5, 1940; published in The Listener, June 13, 1940.

War, Children, Hell, Learning

“It is a lonely and arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter V, Self Adjustment, p. 82

Men, Truth, Courage, Sincerity

“When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

An Outcast of the Islands http://www.gutenberg.org/files/638/638-h/638-h.htm (1896), first lines,

“My dear Sir, [Mr. Trimmer] - I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you, or getting to Heston, must for the present probably vanish. My father told me.... that you and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk as tomorrow, Wednesday.... In looking forward to a Continental excursion, and poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am with disappointment - that if Miss … would but waive bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting one, the same might change occupiers; but not to trouble you further, allow me, with most sincere respect to Mrs. Trimmer and family, to consider myself - Yours most truly obliged, 'J. M. W. Turner.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote from Turner's letter to Mr. Trimmer; as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A., George Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised https://ia601807.us.archive.org/24/items/gri_33125004491185/gri_33125004491185.pdf; London Chatto & Windus, 1897, pp. 225-26 Turner asked assistance about a woman he liked, but not dared to approach; which he met at Trimmer's place at Heston 1795 - 1820

Pleasure, Family, Hope, Disappointment

“April 21. My birthday — I am told the fifty-seventh, and yet I feel only a boy. Must make haste and get my work done ere the night falls. Made an excursion with the babes to Mount Wanda.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

21 April 1895, page 340
John of the Mountains, 1938

Feeling, Boy, Birthday, Night

“I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of their home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it.”

Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878) French painter

Quote in Daubigny's letter to his friend Frédéric Henriet, 1872; as cited in 'Charles-francois Daubigny', by Robert J. Wichenden, in The Century Illustrated Montly Magazine, Vol. XLIV, July 1892, p. 337
1860s - 1870s

Life, Pleasure, Beauty, Feeling

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.

War, Holiday

“We have gone out several times this summer to gather simples and linden blossoms, etc. In each excursion we discover something marvelous, beautiful, and useful in the magnificent forests of Indiana. At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountifully He provides for all our wants -- I would even say for our pleasures! I love our woods and solitude very much; …”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

To the Right Reverend J. Bouvier, Bishop of Le Mans, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, 1850-07-10.

God, Love, Time, Making love